Recommendations or suggestions are part and parcel of nearly every social website that exists and yet they are the one aspect of them all that has the biggest potential to truly suck. I'm going to cover four different sites (Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube) giving my opinions on why their recommendations are a failure or actually work and how to avoid them or at least remove or dismiss them.
Pinterest
Pinterest is my choice for pushiest recommendations for the simple fact that you cannot sign up for the site without choosing five boards to follow. You can't go to the settings or any other part until you do. I just picked five random boards and then I was allowed to proceed. You can then unfollow any or all of those "gateway" boards immediately or any time after.
The site though becomes quite benign after that annoyance. Recommendations come from when you make a re-pin by noting that it has been pinned to another board and gives you the option to go to it. Also by clicking on the menu (hidden by a small symbol of three rectangles in the upper left corner), you can see more board suggestions by various categories.
An additional way to get even more recommendations was recently introduced. A button will allow you to let Pinterest make personalized suggestions by using cookies where its buttons are infused (their word). This is a feature that I haven't turned on (I also have an extension that prevents Facebook from tracking the sites I visit. More on Facebook next.). I prefer a certain level of privacy. Feel free to try it and tell me what you think about it.
Facebook
For overall lousy recommendations, it has got to be Facebook. Here is a list of all of the ways that they try to get you to "like" or follow pages, groups and people: Find Mutual Friends; Get More Updates; Recommended Pages; People to Follow; Suggested Groups; Games You May Like; Rate to Add to Your...; Add to News Feed; Add to...; and Use Friend Finder. These show in a column on the right side of your Home page.
Rate to Add to Your... asks you to give one to five stars to add to movie, TV or book lists.
Add to... asks if you have seen or read something from the same categories.
Get More Updates, People to Follow and Add to News Feed are various ways to get you to add people to your News Feed in a one-way fashion: you get their updates but they don't get yours (rather like circling in Google+). The rest are self-explanatory.
The final ways it makes suggestions are: gifts for people having birthdays as well as a chance to send them a timely greeting; events that show in your News Feed asking if you are going or not; and page likes that occasionally appear when someone shares from them.
Now, ads seem to be the most hated part of Facebook and I won't argue with anyone about that, but that is a different conversation.
My complaint is with the fact that although Facebook gives you a way to remove these suggestions, it never remembers anything.
For example, you also get page recommendations when you click on the Like Pages choice in the left side column and can remove those from that page too, so I spent some time clicking off as many of those as I could until I ran out, only to have some of those same immediately turn up when I returned to my News Feed.
Additionally, all of the Add to... recommendations are un-removable.
I have decided to just stop trying to remove them.
That said, the choices mainly come from pages, people and groups that your Friends have liked or joined. It just so happens that my friends have bad taste (well, tastes that don't match mine). Also, Facebook tracks what sites you visit (provided that it is Facebook enabled) and makes choices based on those visits (or least that is what I understand it does in addition to the info for the ads).
So, recommendations and suggestions that repeat and repeat endlessly unless you like them are possibly the worst of them all.
Now for the good part. The Events and Like Pages that appear in the News Feed can be hidden or even removed. You even get to give a reason why. And in the case of pages, even choose to block further updates from the person who sent them (a kind way to mute someone without un-friending him).
Google+
Google+ is my preferred place to share posts but it is hardly free from unwanted and poor recommendations. These appear in various places.
People you may know on Google+ is the first page when clicking on People from the menu.
Discover communities is displayed under Your communities.
What's hot has it's own menu selection. You can also choose to show those posts in your Home stream.
Trending, You may know, Communities you might like, and Interesting people and pages appear in your Home stream and in the What's hot page feed.
Birthday reminders appear in your Home stream and on Google Search (?).
Highlighted posts (posts that someone has +1'd) are in your Home stream.
Oh, and Write reviews for recent places suggests places based on results from recent searches, especially from Search.
Got it all?
Of these myriad suggestions, only the following appearances may not be dismissed: Trending, anywhere and Birthday reminders in your stream. The rest may be dismissed wherever they appear.
People and community choices are based on who's in your circles and puts you in circles, who you interact with on posts, who belongs to your communities, the communities you belong to (for community suggestions), and, apparently, random choices.
While Google+ is supposed to learn from your dismissals (or mutes) to improve its algorithms, the only one that I found to actually work is the Discover communties suggestions but only when you are using the search to start finding and by dismissing irrelevant choices. However, this only seems to work while you are actually looking at communities. Afterward, it appears to start piling up more irrelevant selections all over again.
The people suggestions seem odd, since you can add someone from a post or comment, in or out of a community, as well as from their profiles, and if I wanted to add them, I could have done it while interacting with them. It seems best suited for use at the very beginning when trying to fill your initial circles.
What's hot can be muted or avoided by simply not showing in your stream.
Highlighted posts can be muted or you can simply not show that circle in your stream (move any person choosing to show their +1s into that circle you are not showing).
Of course, just going to your circles and communities direct feeds means that you will be skipping all of that stream clutter. You also can avoid the People page by clicking on "In this circle" for any of your circles and then clicking on "View my circles" at the bottom of the pop-up card. And since Discover communities is at the bottom of the page, just don't page down. So, most of these annoying choices are easy to dismiss or avoid all together.
YouTube
Finally, YouTube has, easily, the very worst and very best recommendations. The second worst is the Recommended Channels appearing on the right side of your page. You can click to dismiss, but it will ultimately just cycle through a pre-selected forty-odd set with out actually shrinking the list.
This leads to the worst of all: a non-dismissable spin-off called Related Channels which appears when you are viewing someone else's channel.
The channels from both are very poor choices considering that this site has the very best as well (coming up).
Popular videos from Topic - Most popular and Recommended for you (based on the videos you search for and/or view) are a variety of suggestions easily removed by clicking on the small circle that appears in the upper right corner.
The very best of all suggestions, this site or just about any site, is the list of videos that runs along the right side when viewing a video (it will be below the screen when viewing a playlist). I have found that the algorithm gives a much better selection of choices than any others that I have seen, and that goes for all of those previously mentioned and many not even mentioned here.
In fact, most of the previously mentioned seem not to run from an algorithm, but simply recycle a list repeatedly, perhaps hoping that you will add something so that it can finally show new choices.
So in conclusion, I must say that the recommendations of Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube are a mostly sorry collection of "they liked it", "you crossed paths with them" or "it's what everyone else is looking at" choices that you really didn't want to have to see in the first place.
